Nothing about aliens or lone rangers.
Depressed, I replaced the log-book on Isobel’s desk and thought I couldn’t do any more there that was useful. Four of the fleet were still out, not counting the one in France and the one in Ireland, but Harve would see them return. I would hear soon enough if anything went wrong. I yawned, locked up and went home.
Revived by the product of Scotland I sat in my swivelling armchair and rewound the tape of the answering machine on my private line. I’d transferred the business line to Isobel for receiving and making bookings for the fleet, but personal calls came in on a different number. On that Sunday, I’d switched the private answering machine on when I went upstairs to shower, left it on while I picked flowers and took them to the cemetery, left it on of course for the Watermeads’ lunch, and it had been on ever since. The tape wound busily back.
I pressed the play button and nearly fell out of the chair.
The first voice was Jogger’s, hoarse, cockney, unhurried, unafraid.
‘I hate this bloody machine,’ he said. ‘Where have you gone, Freddie? Someone’s half-inched the van. It’s not in the garage here, some tea-leaf’s bloody nicked it while I was zizzing. You’d better tell Sandy— No... wait... hang about...’ His voice stopped for a while and then in some embarrassment went on, ‘Er, um, cancel that, Freddie. I know where it is. It’s down the boozer. Forget I said it, OK?’
The line clicked off, but the second call was also from Jogger. ‘I remembered, like, about the van. Sandy’s got the keys. I’ll walk along to the farmyard first for a decko and then I’ll get the keys. Anyway, I want to tell you, take a butcher’s at them nuns. I found a dead one in the pit last August, and it was crawling and Poland had the same five on a horse last summer and it died. What do you think?’
His voice stopped, leaving me with the problem that I didn’t know what he’d been talking about.
Nuns in the pit! Dead, moreover, like himself. Poor old Jogger, poor old exasperating man.
Why couldn’t he ever say things straight out? His rhyming slang hadn’t seriously mattered before this, but now it was infuriating. Half-inched meant pinched, a tea-leaf was a thief, a butcher’s came from butcher’s hook, look. All those were common parlance, part of the general language. But what were nuns and crawling and Poland?
What I needed, I decided, was a rhyming dictionary, and in the morning I would buy one.
I’d switched my private-line answering machine on at about eleven o’clock that morning. Jogger had been alive then. To be ‘pretty cold’ in the pit by three in the afternoon, he must have died not long after his phone calls. I sat for a while simply looking at the machine as if in some stupid way it could bring my mechanic back to life. If I’d been able to speak to him myself, maybe he would have been still alive. I couldn’t hear the phone’s chirrup when I was in the shower or through the buzz of my electric razor. Perhaps he’d phoned then, but I hadn’t noticed the ‘message received’ light shining. More likely he’d tried when I’d left to pick and take the flowers. I must have missed him by seconds.
With unassuageable regret I ran through a couple of other messages on the tape and I told one or two people about Jogger. The whole village, one way or another, would know of it by bedtime.
By seven-thirty the next morning, after a troubled night’s sleep, I was along at the farmyard talking to the two drivers who were taking runners to Southwell. There was an all-weather track up there, just north-east of Nottingham, giving an underfoot surface which had proved popular because it didn’t crack, freeze or flood like turf. Its only drawback as far as Pixhill trainers were concerned was its distance of a hundred and fifty miles from home: as far as Croft Raceways was concerned, the distance filled the coffers. It was about the furthest the boxes went out and back in one day, entailing early starts and late returns. Anything much further meant overnight stops or two drivers to work in spells.
On that Monday, we had six boxes going to racecourses, two taking broodmares, two abroad and four standing idle, which in view of the persistent flu situation was just as well.
I was out in the farmyard when a woman drove through the gates in a small Ford runabout that had been a long time out of the showroom. She stopped outside the offices and emerged from behind the wheel stretching to a tall thin height in jeans, padded jacket and dark hair scraped back into an untidy pony tail. No make-up, no nail varnish, no pretence at youth.
She was, as she’d said she’d be, almost unrecognisable.
I went across. ‘Nina?’ I said.
She smiled briskly. ‘I’m early, I’m afraid.’
‘All the better. I’ll introduce you to the other drivers... but first I’d better tell you what’s filling their minds.’
She listened to the finding of Jogger with a frown and immediately asked, ‘Have you told Patrick Venables about this?’
‘Not yet.’
‘I’ll do it. I’ll reach him at home.’
I took her into my office and listened to her make the call. ‘It could well be an accident,’ she told her boss. ‘Freddie hopes so. The local police have it in hand. What do you want me to do?’
She listened for a while and said ‘Yes’ a few times, and then handed the receiver to me. ‘He wants to talk to you.’
‘Freddie Croft,’ I said.
‘Let me get this right. This dead man is the one who found the empty containers stuck to your horseboxes?’
‘Yes. My mechanic.’
‘And besides you and me, who knew he’d found them?’
‘Everyone who heard him saying so in a pub in Pixhill on Saturday night and understands rhyming slang.’ He cursed with feeling and I explained about Jogger’s linguistic habits. ‘The local policeman heard him but it didn’t make total sense to him. It would have made total sense, though, to anyone who knew the containers were there. Lone rangers and aliens under the lorries, Jogger said. By lone rangers he meant strangers. Clear as daylight.’
‘I agree.’ Patrick Venables paused. ‘Who was in the pub?’
‘It’s a popular place. I’ll ask the landlord. I’ll go in at lunchtime and tell him I’ll stand a pint to everyone who was there on Saturday night, on Jogger’s last visit. In memory, sort of.’
With humour in his voice, he said, ‘It can’t do any harm. Apart from that, I’ll put out feelers towards your local police to see what they’re thinking. This Jogger’s death may be just an unfortunate coincidence.’
‘I hope so, indeed,’ I said fervently.
He wanted to speak to Nina again and she said ‘Yes’ a few more times, and ‘Goodbye Patrick’ at the end.
‘He wants me to phone him later,’ she said. ‘And on second thoughts, he advises you to be careful in the pub.’
I told her about Jogger’s last message on the answering machine.
‘I’ll write it down for you when I go home,’ I said, ‘but it’s pretty incomprehensible. He used to make up his own rhymes and I’ve never heard him use these before.’
She gazed at me. ‘You’ve had more practice than most.’
‘Mm. I thought of buying a rhyming dictionary, though it’s more a matter of guessing. I mean, when he said carpets he meant drugs. Carpets and rugs. You don’t have to just find the rhyme, you have to find the word that goes with the rhyme, and that association arose solely in Jogger’s own brain.’
‘And if he hadn’t died,’ she said, nodding, ‘you could simply have asked him what he meant.’